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Top Obama Aide Axelrod Hired By…MSNBC

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In this Oct. 7, 2012, photo provided by CBS News, David Axelrod, adviser to the Obama campaign, talks on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in Washington. Credit: AP

NEW YORK (TheBlaze/AP) — David Axelrod, former strategist and aide to President Obama, has landed a new job at NBC News.

The network said Tuesday that Axelrod is joining as a senior political analyst. He’ll contribute to broadcasts on both NBC News and the cable network MSNBC.

Axelrod helped run Obama’s successful campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and worked as an adviser to the president during his first term. The former political writer and columnist for the Chicago Tribune started his own political and media consulting firm in 1984.

NBC already employs Steve Schmidt, a top adviser to Obama’s 2008 opponent John McCain, as an analyst.

And while the news funneling out of the White House might be heavy on spin, the spin zone is increasingly populated by guys who used to work in the White House. The administration couldn’t control the timing of the announcement, on the same morning that the Politico report was boiling over, that David Axelrod will join NBC and MSNBC as a “senior political analyst.” Axelrod, a longtime Obama advisor and MSNBC favorite, officially left his Senior Advisor job at the White House in 2011 to work on the 2012 campaign, but he’s been a vocal supporter of his old boss from the political pasture every since. He’s supported the President, on television or on Twitter, on guns, on immigration reform promises, and on that whole skeet-shooting controversy that’s at the center of how the Obama administration beats off-message messages with its own message. (Flickr photo + Axelrod tweet = end of controversy, goes the thinking.) Axelrod he did say that the immigration bill leak was a dumb idea — on MSNBC, no less!

“…[T]he administration certainly knows its message, its people, its social media, and its fading need for a White House press corps when it has guys like Axe and Gibbs to unofficially lean the right way on a left-leaning network,” he concluded.